Dealing with the Plague

Many Jewish children born in April can look forward to the Torah portion that deals with leprosy. It defies creativity in terms of thinking of something meaningful to say about it.

The young woman who became a bat mitzvah today at Temple Micah actually taught me a lot about this portion. I hadn’t realized that the thought at the time the Torah was written was that leprosy was inflicted on a person in response to something that person did wrong. The commentary suggests that the real catalyst was GOSSIP!

The Torah portion goes into great detail describing the particular lesions and how they were to be judged pure or impure. Impurity brought with it exile for 7 days, during which the person was supposed to think about his or her sins, and then a recheck by the priests at the end of the isolation period. If a priest got it, his career was over because the priests could only serve as long as they were “without blemish”.

I found myself thinking that if this were true, there might be an epidemic of leprosy in the DC Blogging community right about now after this past week's accusations and counter-accusations. My heart went out to all the victims who have told their stories of hatred and persecution. I know some of these people and wish we could roll back time to when we all basically got along. But it’s not that easy.

Reya and I noted that we Blog using our real names and even include pictures and have never experienced incidents of stalking or negative comments. That probably has a lot to do with how old we are and the subject matter of our Blogs. Who really cares about an aging soon-to-be-retired Bureaucrat or a photographer who finds the wind and the puddles of DC interesting?

But maybe this is a timely reminder to think about what we say about others. Gossip has a nasty way of making and breaking alliances at the same time. Nothing good has ever come of it. But fortunately nothing as bad as leprosy has come of it either.